Tag Archives: Architecture

March 9, 2011

Hand-drawn Houses

By daseger

If hand-drawn architectural sketches and renderings are on the verge of becoming a lost art in this age of Autocad, then I would imagine that they would increase in value exponentially in the coming decades.  My husband-the-architect can draw beautifully, as can lots of other architects that we know (Salem seems to be a magnet for architects) but they are all in their 40s:  are they the last generation of sketching architects?  While searching for some information about a Boston architect named Arthur Little who studied, sketched, and worked in Salem, I came across a periodical entitled The American Architect and Building News which was packed with amazing illustrations over its relatively short (1876-1908) life.  I think I’m next-to-last in a long list of  bloggers who have discovered this resource (and I’m sure it must be a key primary source for architectural historians), but I’m still going to showcase some of my favorite illustrations. 

The American Architect was published every Saturday by a series of Boston publishers.  It was first and foremost a trade publication, containing industry news and notices, classified as “Building Intelligence”, as well as plans, sketches, and photographs of newly-commissioned and -built structures.  Its scope was national, even international, but there are lots of Boston-area buildings given its place of publication.  This was the gilded age, and elaborate summer cottages were given pride of placement.  It was also an age of the emerging Colonial Revival style, and so architects like Little looked for inspiration for their new houses in the old colonial towns, like Salem.  Below are some detail drawings of the very inspirational Peirce-Nichols house from several 1886 issues of The American Architect and a contemporary phot0graph of the house.

Some illustrations from issues of The American Architect published in 1884, including sketches of  a “cottage” in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, the Ames Building in Boston (the city’s first “skyscraper”)  by H.H. Richardson, a facade and details of a house in Scotland, and a Queen Anne-style house in Pittsburgh:

More details from an old Salem houses,  drawn by Frank W. Wallis (who did the Peirce Nichols house sketches above), from an 1886 issue of The American Architect, and comparative cornices and door hardware from 1889 issues:

No detail was too small for The American Architect and Building News.  Given the era, there are also lots of technical drawings, for plumbing and “sanitation”, electrical wiring, fire prevention (the goal was a “slow-burning house”), and studies of shade and shadows.  The work of draftsmen like E. Eldon Deane (whose sketches are above) set an artistic standard for the magazine which even extended to advertisements like the one from Cabot below. 

A sprawling summer cottage in Dublin, New Hampshire and exterior and interior sketches for an urban residence, from 1889:

The publishers of American Architect clearly realized the value of  their drawings and published several portfolio volumes of single sheet prints like the 12-series “Georgian Period” below, currently on sale for $5000 here.   Individual colored prints, like the dining room of the Emmerton House in Salem and the “morning room” of  a house in Boston’s  Back Bay, both drawn by Arthur Little, were also produced, an acknowledgement that the architect, was, in fact, an artist.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

February 25, 2011

Roof Windows and Skylights

By daseger

Our house is a north-facing double house so light is always in short supply.  The previous owners of the house–several of them–responded by adding what they called “roof windows” and we call skylights.  Roof windows go way back in American architecture, to the eighteenth century, when they were of course made of wood. Thomas Jefferson incorporated thirteen of them into the design of Monticello as he wanted his house to be flooded with natural light as often as possible.  There’s also a great roof window at Hamilton House in South Berwick, Maine, one of  Historic New England’s properties (an amazing house near my hometown of York; check out this great post by The Down East Dilettante for more information and photographs).

We have three roof windows:  one on each of the house’s three floors.  The first- and third-floor windows are in the back part of the house which was added on in intervals after 1860, so they are not that special.  However, the second-floor opening, which is in the original part of the (1827) house, is really interesting.  It cuts through the middle of the house and there is a ceiling window and a 12-foot beadboard light well that opens up to a second window in the roof.  Both windows are attached to and can be opened by a metal rod and a rope (though they seldom are as birds inevitably fly in and around the house).

  Two views of the roof window on the first floor, in the kitchen pantry.

  Three views of the roof window from our second floor.

.  Roof window in the third-floor back hall; more of a conventional skylight. The transom windows on this floor are another way to let in the light.

Hunting around for some images of roof windows similar to my own, I didn’t find much, or actually any.  But I can’t resist showcasing this amazing house in Newburgh, New York which was very well-documented, inside and out, by the Historic American Building Survey.  The William  C. Hasbrouck House , also known as the “Tuscan Villa” was built in 1838 and is (it seems to be still standing on Google maps, though I can only see it from above; it looks like something is happening to the roof!) very impressive, so much so that the HABS photographer Jack E. Boucher takes us all through the house, including up into the attic where we can see how a quite ordinary roof window was turned into a spectacular interior skylight.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Home, Salem

February 15, 2011

Save Sherlock’s House

By daseger

Actually it’s the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose country house is endangered. Undershaw House, built by Doyle in the Surrey countryside south of London in 1897 for his  invalid wife and family, is threatened by partition and “redevelopment” and an energetic preservation effort has emerged to secure its protection: the Save Undershaw Preservation Trust.  Photographs of the house in 1900 and today are from the Trust’s website and the BBC, along with one showing the Doyle family in residence at the height of a Surrey summer from the New York Public Library. 

Historic Preservation must be a local effort, but often a national, or even global, focus can really help.  Salem has certainly confronted its preservation challenges in the past, from the threatened “Witch House” (which I still prefer to call the Jonathan Corwin House) in the 1940s to urban renewal 20 years later.  Local preservationists were on the front line in both cases, but a timely article by famed architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times (“Urban Renewal Plan Threatens Historic Sites in Salem, Mass.”, October 13, 1965) certainly helped to prevent the total levelling of downtown.  More recently, Walmart abandoned its plans to build a store on the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia under pressure from a coalition of local and national preservation organizations, including the Civil War Trust.  I imagine there are voices in Britain saying we have so many old, Edwardian, authors’, country, etc….houses, we can’t save them all  but it looks like a pretty special house to me.

Arthur Conan Doyle sold Undershaw after the successive deaths of his wife and son, but in the two decades that the family was in residence he published several Sherlock stories and novels, including the Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in the Strand Magazine from 1901-4.  A Strand cover is pictured below, along with one of Sidney Paget’s illustrations from Baskervilles, a sketch of Arthur Conan Doyle at the height of his fame, and–just to establish our Salem interest and connection–the box for Parker Brothers’ Sherlock Holmes Game from 1904.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses

February 4, 2011

A White Robe of Roofs

By daseger

Every time I was in range of a radio yesterday there was a story about collapsing roofs.  Of course, most were flat roofs (I keep wanting to write rooves, but apparently that is not done anymore), covering modern commercial structures.  Our colonial predecessors had other ideas, and their steep, sloping roofs seem to be bearing up pretty well under all the snow—now and for the past 350 years or so.  Here are some pictures I took over the past few snowy days of some of Salem’s first period houses:  the Narbonne House, the so-called “Witch House” (more accurately designated the Jonathan Corwin House), the Peabody Essex Museum’s John Ward House, and the House of the Seven Gables (also known as the Turner-Ingersoll House).

For the sake of comparison (of both season and era), the same houses are featured below in a series of photographs from the Historic American Building Survey, a New Deal project in which photographers, architects, and draftsmen were put  to work documenting historic structures  for the National Park Service.  While the Narbonne house and the Gables look quite similar, the Jonathan Corwin house would be unrecognizable without its Old Witch house sign, as this was more than a decade before Historic Salem, Inc. removed the attached storefront in the process of a comprehensive restoration. In a turn-of-the-century photography by the Detroit Publishing Company, the John Ward house is pictured in its original location (St. Peter’s Street) just before its move to its present site.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Salem

February 1, 2011

Walker Evans in Salem

By daseger

Browsing around the “past exhibitions” section of the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for no particular reason, I encountered some stunning photographs of Salem buildings by Walker Evans (1903-75), the great American photographer.  I had only a vague knowledge of Evans, primarily identifying him as a photographer of people rather than places, particularly people like the woman below, an Alabama tenant farmer’s wife at the height of the Great Depression.  This photograph is from the vast collection of images Evans produced for the Farm Security Administration, with the specific aim of documenting the economic devastation in rural America in the 1930s.

According to his biography (there are several:  I consulted Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans:  a Biography), Evans and a companion took a road trip through New England in the spring of 1931, before he began his work for the government. They were looking for buildings from America’s prosperous past, both still gleaming and slightly weathered.  Salem had much to offer Evans in both regards, but the photographs that survive from his time here do not include any federal buildings, so closely associated with the city’s golden age.  Instead, Evans seemed to have been drawn to Greek and Gothic Revival structures, including City Hall, two Broad Street houses, and what must be the old Peabody Estate at Kernwood, later pulled down by the Kernwood Country Club.  He also made prints of the Assembly House on Federal Street, an eighteenth-century building which he identified as Greek Revival, and the ultimate Gothic (or Norman) Revival structure, the Boston and Maine Railroad Depot, demolished in 1954 (virtually overnight, according to local lore and legend).  The final image is a portrait of the photographer himself as a young man.

Addendum:   A next-day correction to my assertion above that the Kernwood Country Club took down the old Peabody residence.  I have been in their present clubhouse several times and could not imagine that it was the same building, but I have a nice note from the general manager of the club informing that indeed it is.  Apparently there was a fire in the 1950s which destroyed the gabled roof and upper stories, and so a flat roof was put on and later additions and reconfigurations were made, but the core of the clubhouse is in fact the building you see above.

4 Comments   |  tags: , | posted in History, Salem

January 28, 2011

Storybook Style in Salem

By daseger

Salem has much more than Federal houses to offer architecture aficionados.  The house below is located on a side street off Lafayette Street, which I walk down every other day to get to class.  I always “check in”  because it makes me happy just to look at it, so I’m not surprised to hear from my architect friends (including my husband) that this is an example of Storybook style, one of several variants of the Tudor Revival style that was so popular across the United States in the 1920s and early 1930s.

I probably should have waited until after the snow melts to showcase this house, but who knows when that will happen?  Unfortunately, its most striking feature, a sloping faux thatched roof with rolled edges, is almost completely obscured by the snow.  Its singular windows (actually an eyebrow dormer and an octagonal window), however, are almost highlighted by the winter setting.

This area of Salem was devastated by the great Salem Fire of 1914 (much more on that later), so there are lots of houses that were built in the interwar architectural styles, including Craftsman, English Cottage, and Colonial Revival examples, but none quite as fanciful as this storybook house.  This is a rare style for Salem and New England; according to the sources I consulted (the great book below, published in 2001, and the storybookers website) storybook houses are much more common on the west coast (particularly California, of course).

Below is the house that everyone cites as the ultimate (or most whimsical) Storybook house, which is ironically called the “Witch’s House”!  More formally known as the Spadena house, it was built in 1921 and moved to its present location in Beverly Hills a decade later.

Photograph courtesy Christopher Wolff Photography

The “storybook architect” was a Californian named William Raymond Yelland, and I can’t ascertain whether he might have had anything to do with the creation of our Salem house.  Perhaps indirectly; the 1920s and 1930s seem to have been a golden age of sorts for homebuilding magazines and mail-order house plans, and the examples below look vaguely similar to the house off Lafayette Street, though clearly not as special.

9 Comments   |  tags: , | posted in Salem

January 23, 2011

Frank W. Cousins and Salem

By daseger

Quite possibly Frank Cousins (1851-1925),  photographer, author and entrepreneur, has contributed more to the evolving image of Salem than anyone else.  His primary contribution is photographic:  Cousins took thousands of pictures of Salem’s colonial and federal buildings prior to World War One, and the Cousins Collection remains an essential visual record of the pre-war, pre-fire, pre-modern city.  Cousins was a pioneer in the specialized genre of architectural photography, and his photographs of Salem exteriors and interiors can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the archives of university libraries and architectural firms, as well as in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum.  The series of photographs published between 1891 and 1901, entitled “Historic Views of Salem” , established his reputation and led to photographic endeavors in other historic eastern cities as well as to his authorship (with Phi Madison Riley) of The Wood-carver of Salem:  Samuel McIntire, His Life and Work and The Colonial Architecture of Salem.    

 Peirce-Nichols House, Federal Street

 

 Timothy Orne House, Essex Street

 

 Narbonne House, Essex Street

 

Miles Ward House, Derby and Herbert Streets

 

Caroline Emmerton House, Essex Street

 

Lindall-Andrews House Interior, Essex Street

 

 Exterior Door Detail, Gardner-Pingree House, Essex Street

Cousins was a great advocate for Salem and Samuel McIntire, but he was also an entrepreneur, operating a successful store called the “Bee-Hive”, or more accurately “Frank Cousins’ Bee-Hive”, at 172 Essex Street for many years.  His success was clearly based on his ability to offer products representing ALL of Salem’s attractions, not just its architecture.  This was, after all,  the era of Daniel Low’s “Witch Spoon”.  An 1891 Scribner’s Magazine advertisement placed by Cousins reads:  HISTORIC SALEM.  The Scene of Witchcraft and the Home of Hawthorne.  Views of its nooks and corners, highways and by-ways, from “Witch Hill” to the “House of the Seven Gables”.  If surviving copies are any indication, Cousins also issued many trade cards to advertise his business, including the unusual patriotic cards featuring the opposing candidates of the 1880 presidential election, as well as more conventional examples.

 Matched trade cards courtesy Rare Flags

 

 In his shop, Cousins was not averse to selling witch wares.  His postcards bore the title Ye Olde Witch City Salem, and he also sold souvenirs such as the ceramic boot and  dish below,  marked “Salem 1692, Carlsbad China, Made in Austria for Frank Cousins, Salem, Mass.”  Cousins’ offerings of  “historic souvenir china” also included an early example of Hawthorneana (if there is such a word):  the Hawthorne Tile, made at the famous Staffordshire pottery in England, showing Hawthorne, his birthplace, the House of the Seven Gables and the Old Town Pump, available for 50 cents according to an 1893 advertisement in Putnam’s Monthly Historical Magazine.  I’m still on the hunt for this tile, but I’m sure that Cousins produced enough inventory for me to find at least one.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

January 15, 2011

A Lost and Missing Church

By daseger

The master architect, builder, and woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) created the city (as opposed to the town) of Salem.  His career both coincides with and reflects Salem’s golden age; from 1780 until his death he designed more than 50 public buildings, churches, and houses, many of them still standing but unfortunately not all.  This weekend marks the anniversary of his birth; this year marks the bicentennial of his death.  In 2007, the Peabody Essex Museum marked the 250th anniversary of McIntire’s birth with an impressive and comprehensive exhibition,  Samuel McIntire:  Carving an American Style, and a companion volume of the same name by PEM Curator Dean Lahikainen which must be the definitive study of McIntire’s architecture and craftsmanship.  Obviously there is little that I could possibly add to these scholarly testaments to McIntire other than my own personal view.  I live in the McIntire Historic District (the largest of Salem’s four districts), and I’m surrounded by surviving McIntire buildings, but the McIntire structure in which I’m the most interested is no longer here:  the South Church, missing from Chestnut Street.

All of McIntire’s Salem churches have been lost, but I’m particularly fascinated by the South Church, which the PEM exhibition calls a  “masterpiece in religious architecture”:  perhaps because of its (former) proximity to my own house, perhaps because of its (former) Cathedralesque stature and its (lost) 150-foot steeple, certainly because of the almost-haunting images below.

Photograph credits:  NYPL Digital Gallery (2); Edwin Monroe Bacon, Boston; A Guide Book (1903); Peabody Essex Museum Phillips Library; Harvard Schlesinger Library.  (Ironically, just across from the house depicted in this last 1882 photograph, the Eden-Browne House  on the corner of Broad and Summer Streets, was Samuel McIntire’s own house and workshop at 31 Summer Street, taken down to make room for the headquarters of the Holyoke Mutual Insurance Company after 1936.)

4 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Salem

January 13, 2011

Snowy Chestnut Street, 1899 and 2011

By daseger

Another digging-out day on Chestnut Street, but clear and bright, with the trees bearing the brunt of yesterday’s storm.  Here are a few images of the street on days after the storm:  today and in 1899.  The historical images, from Loring family archives in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, are looking up and down the salt-free  (and obviously car-free) street.  The eastward perspective has a nice view of the facade of Samuel McIntire’s majestic South Congregational Church, which stood from 1804 until its destruction by fire in 1903.  When I look at this photograph, I can appreciate the gaping hole that was opened up on the street  by that fire only several years later, a hole that was not really filled by the construction of a new and less-impressive  Gothic Revival church which itself burned down in 1950, not to be replaced.  A sidewalk view of the street best approximates the feeling of 1899, though of course, and sadly, there are no Elm trees.   There are also several images of stately houses on the sunny side of the street today, where the mix of sunshine and snow-covered trees created some interesting shadows.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Salem

December 27, 2010

“Great Snows” of 1717 and 2010

By daseger

Very snowy day in Salem, though hardly as dramatic as the “Great Snow of 1717” which buried New England under five feet of snow and drifts of 25 feet or more for several weeks.  This big event is recorded by many Massachusetts notables, including contemporaries Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall and Salem’s own Nathaniel Hawthorne—over a century later.  Hawthorne had a complicated relationship with his native city, which is evident not only by the addition of the “w” in his name to differentiate himself from his witch trial judge ancestor John Hathorne, but also by many of his works.  Nevertheless, the city also furnished him with lots of material and he remains inextricably tied to it.  From my perspective as a historian, one of Hawthorne’s best Salem works is his short story Main Street, published in 1852 in a collection entitled The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales.  This little story presents its readers with Salem’s colonial history from a very Hawthornian perspective:  the author takes on his witch-hunting and privateering ancestors and Cotton Mather as well.  He also gives us a nice description of snowy Salem in 1717, but not quite today: 

     The Main Street has vanished out of sight.  In its stead appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peeping over it, cold and bright, and tingeing the white expanse with the faintest and most ethereal rose-color.  This is the Great Snow of 1717, famous for the mountain drifts in which is buried the whole country.  It would seem as if the street, the growth of which we have noted so attentively, following it from its first phase, as an Indian track, until it reached the dignity of sidewalks, were all at once obliterated, and resolved into a drearier pathlessness than when the forest covered it.  The gigantic swells and billows of the snow have swept over each man’s metes and bounds, and annihilated all the visible distinctions of human property.  So that now the traces of former times and hitherto accomplished deeds being done away, mankind should be at liberty to enter on new paths, and guide themselves by other laws then heretofore; if, indeed, the race be not extinct, and it be worth our while to go on with the march of life, over the cold and desolate expanse that lies before us.  It may be, however, that matters are not so desperate as they appear.  That vast icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in the sunshire, must be the spire of the meeting-house, incrusted with frozen sleet.  Those great heaps, too, which we mistook for drifts, are houses, buried up to their eaves, and with their peaked roofs rounded by the depth of snow upon them.  There, now, comes a gush of smoke from what I judge to be the chimney of the Ship Tavern; and another—another—and another—from the chimneys of the other dwellings, where fireside comfort, domestic peace, the sports of children, and the quietude of age are living yet, in spite of the frozen crust above them.

Pictures from my little corner of Salem today:  lower Chesnut Street and Samuel McIntire’s Hamilton Hall (1805).  Clearly, “all the visible distinctions of human property” survived the storm.

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